As it is
by solveariddle
Summary: For years, Cal and Gillian have been dithering over a certain issue. Will they or won't they? If they are unable to take the next step, maybe someone or something else has to give them a gentle push. This story is different from anything I've ever written and my first contribution to the #PostSecretChallenge.


**A/N:** This is my first contribution to whathobertie's #PostSecretChallenge.

The secret this story is based on is: "I sometimes think non-living things communicate with each other when humans are not around."

I couldn't resist weaving a story about this secret and hope you have as much fun reading as I had writing.

 **Disclaimer:** LTM and its characters belong to FOX. I'm just borrowing them from time to time because they will always have a special place in my heart.

* * *

There are things between heaven and earth no one knows about and if we knew, they would defy any explanation science has to offer. Some of those things are scary, some boring, some... well, let's say, they would come as a surprise. Why do we assume that there is nothing there just because we can't see it? Why do we refuse to believe something just because we don't understand it? Why do we suppose there is silence in an empty room?

Open your mind and accompany me on a journey that might lead beyond your imagination or maybe not. Come on, find out if you dare.

* * *

There is a new recamier in Cal Lightman's office. He had spotted it in his favorite antique shop and it was delivered today. The recamier is plushy and a tad fancy. Cal sets no great store by furnishing, but he appreciates a piece of furniture that allows him to indulge in an afternoon nap from time to time. The recamier already passed the test this afternoon. It feels, indeed, as plushy as it looks and is very comfortable.

By now the premises of The Lightman Group are empty. Everyone has gone home. There should be silence but instead...

"Ahem," the recamier clears its throat. "My good manners require that I introduce myself to you. Since I'm a lady, I don't talk about my age, but I think I don't disclose too much by telling you that I have travelled far and seen a lot. I am from the Kingdom of Great Britain."

 _Hello, Welcome, Nice to meet you_ – the voices overlap, only the sarcastic _Aye_ of Cal's desk standing out. It has seen a lot, too, and is not easily impressed.

The brief pause that follows doesn't last long. They all know what's coming next.

"It's so nice to welcome a new member," Cal's paperweight coos as the rest of the furniture sighs united.

Cal Lightman is the quintessence of creative chaos. He doesn't arrange the documents on his desk, always finds what he is looking for, anyway. Someone gave the paperweight to Cal as a gift years ago. Since then it has been spending its life disregarded and underestimated. Cal doesn't even know it's there. That's why it ties into situations like these to make a name for itself. A recurring habit that is tolerated by the rest of the furniture.

"Let me tell you a story about the owners of this company," the paperweight begins. "For example, how Cal Lightman and Gillian Foster met."

"Ugh," the floor lamp can't bite back the annoyed remark but is shushed by the others even if all of them are thinking the same. _Not that again._ It's going to be a long night.

* * *

"Your 5 PM appointment is here," Cal's intercom tells him. He hates the thing. The bodiless voice of his secretary makes him flinch every time it intrudes his thoughts.

Nevertheless, he stands up and puts his jacket on. Wearing a suit is one of the concessions he has learned to make as the owner of a company although he will never understand why his clients tend to respect him more in a suit than in casual clothing. Thoughts and words should matter and not the packaging. All right, then. One more appointment before he will go home to his wife and daughter. He promised to be home for dinner. His seat at the table was vacant far too often lately due to his obsession with micro expressions that let him forget there is something like finishing time.

There is a woman sitting in the conference room, waiting for him. As he opens the door and walks toward her, he does the first analysis, as always. Albeit it has to be quick, he is seldom wrong. Cal is not the best in his field for nothing.

The woman looks young, but her body language that oozes self-confidence and experience tells him that she is older than she looks. The way she stands up and shakes his outstretched hand is warm and detached at the same time, confirming his surface impression. This is a woman who knows what she wants and probably has learned to use her innocent appearance to get it. As a side note, Cal perceives that she is exactly his height, some inches shorter actually because she is wearing high heels. _Nice_. He likes that. The heels and the matching height.

"Cal Lightman. How can I help you?"

They sit down and he registers with irritation that he strayed from his script. _What can I do for you?_ That is his usual question. Something about her must have aroused his protective instinct.

"Gillian Foster."

She is pretty but this is not what has piqued Cal's interest, at least not in the first place. When they greeted each other and she looked him straight in the eye, he saw determination mixed with unease. It was a bit blurry though, as if she was wearing an invisible shield that shut him off. And right now it happens again. He sees something flit across her face but has to concentrate hard to decipher what it is. _Interesting_. That has never happened to him before and Cal is always up for a challenge.

Gillian Foster shifts around on her chair until she becomes aware of it and stops, straightening herself. Embarrassment. That's what flitted across her face before. Something that Cal often sees in the face of his clients and that disclosed she is here for private reasons. Whenever people hire him on that account, they are embarrassed and need a moment to compose themselves. After all, he is nothing but a stranger about to sniff around in their lives or in the life of someone close to them.

"I need you to check someone. My, um, my fiancé," her voice is calm but judging from the pulse of her carotid, it takes a lot of willpower to appear as composed as she does. She must know some special breathing technique to control her voice like that.

Where's smoke, there's fire. If she's here, she fears that he ascertains something about her fiancé even if she hopes he will come back empty-handed. More often than not, Cal's findings of the truth hurt someone. He catches himself thinking that he doesn't want her to get hurt.

 _What did the bastard do to you?_

If she is here, her fiancé must have done something already. Gillian Foster doesn't strike him as the type of woman who involves others without further ado. She came to him because she saw no other way out.

Vulnerability. Strength. Desperation. It is fascinating, the way her invisible shield is there one moment and gone the next so that he hovers between clarity and blindness when it comes to reading her. Cal realizes that he is so focused on studying Gillian Foster's face that he forgot to continue the conversation.

"Why?" he asks eventually.

The personal meeting is essential for the final decision. His secretary does the preselection, but in the end Cal only accepts approximately half of the requests he receives. Reading people is as personal as it gets and he doesn't do it whenever he feels uncomfortable with a request or a client. Not that he considers refusing this certain client.

"Because..." She casts down her eyes and takes a deep breath. "Because I need to know whether Alec had a relapse before I marry him. When me met, he'd just gone through drug withdrawal. I didn't even think of it anymore until a few months ago when... There were some incidents and I'm not sure anymore. If he lied to me..."

"Don't wanna marry a liar, yeah?"

Her eyes flash anger. This time Cal sees it in no uncertain manner.

"Can you do it discreetly? Alec... He is in politics and I don't want to endanger his career."

"Politics?" Cal doesn't even try to hide his dislike. Most politicians he met had a much higher frequency of lies than the average person but were only half as good at hiding their false statements as they thought. Somehow, he can't imagine the woman sitting in front of him being one of them. "Are you too?"

"No. I'm a psychologist." She blushes but holds his gaze, daring him to judge her.

Cal doesn't need to read her to guess right. It's common sense. Gillian Foster considers her inability to find out the truth a failure, personal as well as professional. He is a far cry from judging her. In fact, he feels for her. Moreover, and albeit Gillian Foster can't know that _discreet_ is not one of Cal's prominent attributes, it explains why she is here and didn't hire a private investigator instead. It speaks for her that she has the best interests of her fiancé at heart even if she mistrusts him to some extent. The mere fact that she is willing to let a stranger in on her fiancé's secret, to pay for the truth, implies, though, that she doesn't trust the man she is about to marry. No matter what Cal will find out, even if there was no lie, their relationship will be damaged beyond repair. Gillian Foster knows it. She just isn't ready to accept it yet.

 _I'm sorry._

He didn't say it out loud, but her expression changes as if she read him. It's not possible, is it? But Cal senses some kind of connection between them. This gets more and more interesting by the minute.

"People lie all the time," he says. "And the closer someone is to you, the more difficult it is to see the lie. They become your blind spot."

The look in her eyes softens and she nods a silent thank you.

"So you will find out if he lied to me?"

"Yeah. I will."

With those three words their lives were about to take an unexpected turn. They didn't know back then. Couldn't. Cal should have thought about the next steps, about more questions he should have asked her to get more background information regarding her fiancé. And if not that, he should have thought of his family. But instead there was only one thought on his mind.

 _I want to have dinner with you and whatever comes next._

* * *

"Excuse me? That is. Not. What. Happened," the high-pitched voice of the emergency lighting breaks the silence, overly accentuating each word. It has been activated only now because the sun has set.

There is some yawning and murmuring in the background as the pieces of furniture wake up one by one. They dozed off. In the beginning, it was interesting to listen to the paperweight's fabricated _how Cal Lightman and Gillian Foster met_ stories, but by this time the paperweight has run out of ideas and is repeating itself. It's boring, even if that was one of the more interesting fabrications.

"How much longer do we have to listen to your fantasies?" the emergency lighting isn't able to calm itself. Its time is limited, especially during summer when its services are only required a few hours per night. Therefore it can't stand it if time is wasted. "Cal Lightman and Gillian Foster met when they both worked for the Pentagon. Everyone knows that. She was his therapist. He was her patient. There was a murder and a cover-up. She kept the secret from him for years. Big mystery revealed, major fallout, reconciliation. They hugged and made up. Blah. Blah. Fast forward several years and _still_ nothing has changed." The emergency lighting has talked itself into a rage and pauses to draw breath.

"The story was contrived?" the recamier is indignant.

The paperweight doesn't answer; the interruption of the emergency lighting has disgruntled it so that it has decided to remain silent for the rest of the night.

"Yes," the emergency lighting confirms in its stead. "The story was but not its essence. That's what I'm talking about. They are made for each other and don't do _anything_ about it. It's enough to drive you mad!"

"How do you know?" the recamier has decided to let the paperweight get away scot-free and addresses the rest of the furnishings instead.

The question arouses a wild murmur, only fragments of the answers intelligible.

 _...what kind of question..._

 _...the way they look at each other..._

 _...personal space..._

 _...his blind spot..._

 _...no risks when it comes to her..._

 _...he drools over photographs of her when he is alone in his office..._

 _..._ _she sometimes cries when she thinks no one hears it..._

 _...everyone knows...everyone knows...everyone knows..._

The voices increase in loudness and conflate into an incomprehensible cacophony of letters and noise until the recamier can't bear it any longer.

"Stop!" it yells and to its surprise the noise subsides. "So if _they_ don't do something about it, why don't _you_?"

Silence. And then the whispering starts and forms two words. Even the worn off rug that usually keeps to itself and doesn't participate in any kind of socializing joins in.

 _We should._

* * *

Gillian needs to read the file before she leaves. It contains information regarding their first appointment on the following day and she doesn't feel like taking work home, wants to take a long, hot bath and go to bed early instead. Fall turns into winter; the rain outside mixes with snow. Although it's not that late in the afternoon, it's almost dark already. When she switches her desk lamp on, though, nothing happens. She switches it off and on again with the same result before she stands up to check the floor lamp. Nothing. Gillian sighs and walks over to the light switch next to the door. She doesn't like the ceiling light. It's too bright; she prefers a more comfortable illumination, especially at this time of the year. However, when she actuates the switch, the room remains in semi-darkness. None of her lamps are working.

"Huh."

Now that is weird. She opens the door of her office. The lights in the rest of the premises seem to be working. Gillian briefly contemplates calling the janitor before she picks the file up and walks out.

"See? I told you she wouldn't let it get fixed today," the desk lamp chirps. Gillian Foster is its role model. It claims to know her inside out and adores her. If it could move, it would love to copy the swinging of her hips. This is the reason it sometimes falls over at night, causing Gillian to wonder how that was possible when she comes in in the morning.

"The crackle was a bit too much," the shelf addresses the ceiling light.

"I don't think she heard it," the ceiling light explains itself muttering. Since everyone knows it is not Gillian Foster's favorite lamp, it was so excited about its leading part in their scheme that it overacted a bit.

"Let's hope they get their part right," the voice of Gillian's desk is tense as all of them fall silent to overhear at least parts of what is going to happen in the other room.

* * *

"Hey." Cal is sitting behind his desk when Gillian enters his office. "Can I join you? The electricity in my office is not working and I need to read this." She holds the file up.

"Course, luv."

Cal stands up and walks over to his floor lamp. It is supposed to illuminate the sitting area in his office that newly includes the recamier. When he switches the light on, it functions properly.

Just as Gillian is about to sit down and Cal is about to turn around and go back to his desk, there is a whiff in the air that might have sounded like a _now_ to someone who was paying attention to things like that before Cal's ankle inexplicably becomes entangled in the cable of his floor lamp. It has been with him right from the start and is fiercely loyal to its owner, only wants the best for him.

"Oi!"

Cal loses balance, hangs on to Gillian's arm to steady himself but fails, pulling her over, so that they both end up on the recamier. It's strange. The moment he lands on the soft piece of furniture, it feels as if the recamier adjusts its size. It is designed to fit one person. But even given the fact that Gillian is lying more on top of him than next to him, it should be more uncomfortable. Instead, nothing about this is uncomfortable. Awkward. Definitely. But uncomfortable? No. In fact, Cal feels as alive as he hasn't been feeling for quite a while.

"Everything OK, luv?"

"Yeah."

Her face is only inches from his, his hand on her hip, holding her so that she doesn't slide away. Neither of them moves. Get up or stay? Take the chance or let it pass? Somehow they are both waiting for a sign. Then the lamps in Cal's office go black all at once and he feels Gillian holding her breath for a moment before she speaks.

"Must be the plan of a higher power."

It's dim in the room but not utterly dark. Cal can still see Gillian's outline. He doesn't have to see her face to know what her pupils must look like. The same as his. He reaches out and touches the back of her neck, pulling her even closer. This will be his last words. After them he plans to not talk for a while.

"Must be."

* * *

Long after Cal Lightman and Gillian Foster went home that evening, all the lights are still on in the premises of The Lightman Group. It's an office building; therefore no one pays attention. If there had been someone working late on one of the other floors, there would have been a complaint about nighttime disturbance. As it is, no one notices, no one hears the voices of the furnishings when they are singing along to the music.

 _Celebrate. Good times. Come on._

 _It's a celebration._

 _Celebrate. Good times. Come on._

 _Let's celebrate._

* * *

The end


End file.
